Sachets known in the art include flexible sachets wherein the contents are expelled by, for example, tearing off a corner or end of the sachet and exerting pressure on the exterior of the sachet.
Other prior art devices include rigid moulded "tray" or "blister" type sachets wherein the condiment or similar substance is sealed in by means of an aluminium foil or plastic lid. The lid is heat-sealed or otherwise secured to the upper edges of the tray. In this case the contents are extracted by peeling back the foil lid and either exerting pressure on the lid and the plastic tray or by using an implement such as a knife or spoon to extract the contents.
These constructions suffer disadvantages in that they can be expensive to manufacture, messy to use and, when extracting the contents of the sachet, behave unpredictably in terms of the flow of the substance through, for example, the aperture formed by tearing off the corner of the sachet. In the case of the tear-back foil lid the mobility and ease of extraction of the contents may vary depending on the viscosity of the contents.
There have been attempts to overcome these disadvantages in the prior art, however they have met with mixed success. One solution includes dividing the rigid tray into two sections and providing a perforated "beak" in a more substantial plastic or foil lid. The beak is located between the two tray sections wherein the tray sections in the beak are arranged so that when the ends of the condiment tray are bent towards each other in such a manner as to crush one section against another, the beak cracks along the aforesaid perforation and the contents may be expelled through the cracked beak by squeezing. This construction suffers from disadvantages in that the perforations sometimes crack in transit, and the contents of the tray sections can spoil or be otherwise contaminated. They are also more complicated structurally and therefore more expensive to manufacture.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a sachet and a means and method for producing the same, which overcomes or at least mitigates the above mentioned disadvantages, or at least provides the public with a useful choice.